Ingrid Hughes was born in London in 1945. She grew up in Greece, Saigon, and Singapore, as well as the United States. Since she was twenty she has lived in New York, where she brought up two children and now teaches English to immigrants and native New Yorkers at the City University of New York. Her poems and stories have appeared in magazines like Lilith, West Branch, and the Massachusetts Review.

Ingrid Hughes

The Veselka

I was waiting for my order with Arthur
and Curtis, my house painter cousin,
at our Nouvelle Ukrainian coffee shop,
when a young woman in tights and a jacket bumbled
conspicuously to the rest room, dragging a huge pocketbook
grabbed from another customer, it turned out.
The manager followed her. He took the bag.
She threw herself on the drafty floor.
She has a mental illness, Arthur said, his favorite diagnosis.
She’s drunk, I said, because of how she was throwing herself around.
Curtis noticed how her belly was exposed
under her light jacket as the manager tried to left her up.
She was good at flopping uncooperatively from his hold.
Call the police, Arthur said, to avoid a struggle.
The manager let her lie on the floor in the draft and phoned,
and Curtis left, then came back with a drop cloth to cover her.
A young cop followed him in.
Oh, it’s you, the cop greeted her. What’s going on?
I feel like killing myself, she said cheerfully.
I can send you to Bellevue.
I want to go to Beth Israel.
So that was what she wanted, a private hospital bed.
She wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t sure she had a mental illness.
But she seemed to be able to take care of herself.
Bellevue, the cop said.
It’s a city hospital, they can’t turn people away.
So she went off with him, our spinach and cheese pirogi came,
and another customer stopped to ask the story.
I told him, She grabbed somebody’s pocketbook.
She wanted to go to Beth Israel.
Israel? he said, bewildered.